Greg Hutchings one of the early symbols of executive excess, will today launch a website for disgruntled shareholders of Lupus Capital as part of a campaign to win support for yet another City comeback.

The 62-year-old entrepreneur, best known for his leadership and ignominious exit from the Tomkins food and engineering conglomerate, wants investor backing to return as executive chairman of Lupus, an industrial investment group from which he was forced out this summer after a collapse in the share price.

Hutchings claims the banks that seized control of Lupus have brought in turnaround managers whose experience is inappropriate for an "excellent" business. In their place, he believes, should be directors with a track record of running public companies, such as himself.

"I would like to enlist your support at a general meeting that I have requisitioned for shareholders to give the management of Lupus back to the team that effectively founded your group," he says in a letter.

He and his team were better able to represent the interests of shareholders not least because of "a personal financial commitment of almost £9m invested, over 11% [of the] shareholding."

Hutchings bought Lupus as a shell company in 2004, saying he wanted to turn it into a "mini-Tomkins with a private equity twist". But after a couple of acquisitions, such as the £84m takeover of door and window seals maker Schlegel, he and his partner, Denis Mulhall, ran into trouble. Recession in the building supply sector and a rise in the value of the dollar in relation to the pound led Lupus in December last year to breach a banking covenant.

Hutchings made his name at Tomkins, a tiny £6m engineering company which he turned into a £5bn industrial giant with 70,000 staff worldwide, and interests from Smith & Wesson guns to Rank Hovis McDougall, the bakers.

But by October 2000, with many of the businesses ailing and its shares at a nine-year low, Hutchings was removed amid claims of "corporate excess".

Accountants, Arthur Andersen, were brought in to investigate allegations of impropriety by Hutchings, of which he was later cleared.